Memoirs of a Shape-shifter - Hardcover

Kaplan-maxfield, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0971377030 ISBN 13: 9780971377035

Publisher: Kepler Pr, 2005

Synopsis

A work of fiction with Gothic undertones shifting between present-day and colonial New England, "Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter" contains within the third-person narrative of Nikki Helmik the found journal of her ancestor, Anne Cleves, written strikingly in first-person. A dramatic story of love, loss, and Druid magic, Anne's journal strangely echoes Nikki's own struggle to resolve the crises in her life. Haunted and inspired by her ancestor, Nikki becomes a Druid magician, resolving for herself the deadly attraction between power and love.This psychological exploration of a woman's all-too-contemporary per­sonal upheaval oscillates between realism and romance, contemplative drama and adventure story, replete with Druid magicians, centuries-old curses, wolves, ravens, and the mystery of a broken brooch. Down Gloucester's narrow streets, deep into Dogtown woods, teetering on granite cliffs and plunged into stormy North Atlantic seas, the reader is drawn into a labyrinth in which the age-old war of the sexes is given a new twist.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield is the author of four novels—Black Forest Love, The Scarab Chase, Hide & Seek, and Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter. A PhD, he has taught both writing and literature at Tufts University and Boston College for the past fifteen years. Lawrence Durrell, Kaplan-Maxfield's friend and correspondent, once told the author, “You have the new book in you.” Kaplan-Maxfield lives in Boston, and in his other life builds houses.

From the Inside Flap

A spell-binding novel, Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter twists the eternal tension between love and power into a marvelous Celtic knot.Nikki Helmik anger-prone, no-longer-young feminist, single mother, and erstwhile Cambridge lawyer following her father's recent death has returned to the vacant family home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to begin a new and quieter life. Her yellow-shingled cottage lies under the branches of mysterious Dogtown woods, once home to Druids and witches. But Nikki grows increasingly unsettled to find herself caught by the charms of the princely Philip, a married man who has recently moved back to the family estate yet who proves maddeningly elusive.Or has Nikki got it backwards: Is she in fact the fleeing one, mistaking emotion for feeling and presuming matters of romance as women's natural territory? The earth's escalating tremors soon leave her shaken to the core when she discovers the lost journal of her shape-shifting ancestor, Anne Cleves, a Druid princess and powerful magician living in Dogtown during the period of the Salem witch trials. Defending herself against her beautiful mentor's vengeance, Nikki must race against her own tangled desires and the bend of time while translating the arcane work, finally to be initiated into her own Druid nature.This woman's post-millenium journey of self-discovery swoops and plunges amidst the rocky cliffs of the New England coast and in its deep forests. Nikki's story is intertwined with her foremother's riveting first-person tale, vividly presented as living history steeped exotically in Celtic lore. Kaplan-Maxfield's artful story-telling provocatively enacts the mystery at the heart of the book: the power of words to make magic in the process turning our conventional understanding of power on its head.

Edition details

• Publisher: Kepler Pr
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971377030
• ISBN 13: 9780971377035
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 440